Steven Moffat delights in keeping Doctor Who fans on their toes — but you always know to expect a few things: 1) The Doctor's fame (or fake death) will be a major issue in his storylines. 2) There'll be some kind of temporal snafu that causes everybody to have to run around the same handful of sets over and over. 3) There will be more jokes about whether the sonic screwdriver works on wood.

Which is why the major huge plot developments revealed by these new Who toys (in the February Diamond catalog) seem terribly plausible. We don't know if these toys refer to actual upcoming developments, or just stuff the toy companies made up, but all the same, here's your spoiler warning.

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Update: According to Ursus-Veritas and various other folks in comments, these toys have been out for ages in the U.K. and are related to various games and things, not so much season 7 of the actual TV show. False alarm!

Last chance to avoid spoilers...

First up, here's the Q.I.A. Anti-Time Device. And it sounds as though we may be circling back around to that storyline where the Doctor pretends to be dead (even though most of his friends know he's alive at this point.) According to the toy's description:

After the Doctor's apparent death, the Cybermen and Daleks went to war across the universe, leaving destroyed worlds in their wake and the Weeping Angels picking over the dead and dying. But the Cleric army fought back and scoured the dead worlds left after the wars, looking for the wreckage of Daleks, Cybermen and broken Angels to create a hugely powerful "anti-time" device. A device part Dalek, part Cyber technology and used the Quantum signature from the Angel to trigger a Gateway to pull enemies into the time Vortex — erasing them from Time completely!

I suppose it's just possible some toy exec thought this would be a cool thing to dream up. But it ships in April, just when the new episodes are airing. Hmm.

Then there's this new trans-temporal sonic screwdriver — the Earth gets trapped in four different time zones by a temporal schism thingy: Elizabethan, Victorian, the present day and Future London. So the TARDIS creates a new sonic screwdriver with features from all four time zones, including a "wood" setting. And "the Doctor must try and free the TARDIS before time runs out" (so to speak.)

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Like I said, these future plot twists seem quite plausible, especially since we know we're spending more time in Victorian England soon. Or maybe this is a more elaborate red herring than usual?